User:Sammi Brie/Infobox radio station revamp/Guide

This page serves as a guide to what's changed in the 2020 redesigns of Infobox radio station and Infobox broadcast.

Formatting and appearance
The templates have new appearances designed to improve the display of information, with new headers for Programming, Ownership, Technical information and Links. The order of similar parameters across templates has been homogenized, as well.

The main difference between the two templates is with city and location information, owing to existing fields in the templates.

New features
The focus in features is on parity. Over the years, the two templates had evolved with diverging capabilities. This brings them much closer together.

Dedicated field for satellite stations, etc.
In Infobox broadcast, it has been common practice to place "Satellite of (station), (city)" in the call letter field for stations that repeat another, for instance KFVE. This has, however, caused a bug in the display of license information links, and there was no equivalent for radio.

For the first time, above is implemented, and this capability comes to radio, too. When a station partially or totally simulcasts another in the same media market or elsewhere, and isn't in a network, this parameter becomes quickly useful. See the demonstration infobox at WLIR-FM.

US license information for radio
One of the new parameters in the radio template is licensing_authority. When set to FCC, the template will display links to the public file and FCC LMS for that station. The template uses the presence of power to determine if the station is AM or FM.

For Infobox broadcast, CDBS has been replaced with LMS. This is part of a general need to sunset CDBS queries for television as the FCC no longer updates CDBS for TV, and a link to LMS can be generated right from the facility ID. There will soon be a discussion on replacement options for TVQ.

Images
The TV template permitted the display of two images—a logo and another image, such as a studio photo—at once. The radio template allowed a caption to be inserted under the logo. These capabilities have been combined, and a caption can be displayed under the logo or the image.

New parameters and changed names
Many parameter names have been unified across templates. In addition, several parameters from one template or the other are now available in both, to support internationalization of these templates not only in the countries where they are used at volume but around the world. During the consultation on this infobox, for instance, I learned that Philippine television stations quote both transmitter power output and effective radiated power, so Infobox broadcast now supports power.

Parameters specific to radio and television (frequency versus channels, for instance) have not been brought over.

Infobox radio station
The parameter name changes for radio are rather light. The "image" field is now "logo" to reinforce the common usage of the top field for logos, though existing transclusions do not need any edits in the first three fields right now. "last airdate" was the only parameter with a space in its name, so converting it to an underscore improves consistency.

New parameters:


 * subchannels allows for the listing of HD Radio subchannels separately from the format box, where much of this information has gone previously.
 * licensing_authority supports the new FCC public file functionality for radio, as in TV.
 * founded brings feature parity.
 * former_names was added last year without any fanfare, so here's some. This is a parameter supporting internationalization in countries that don't make heavy use of call signs.

Infobox broadcast
There are more changes for TV parameter names, which were usually longer than their radio counterparts.

New parameters:


 * repeater supports internationalization efforts. Not all countries have translators, and the former "other_chs" parameter name didn't really work for countries that don't have "translators".
 * network supports internationalization efforts in countries that don't really have US-style affiliations.
 * power supports internationalization efforts, primarily in the Philippines.
 * former_names and language bring feature parity.